by Graham, Jo
Beneath the blue lights of the control room, Beckett’s eyes opened. The young technician monitoring the power output looked around, surprised. It was very quiet, watching someone fly Atlantis.
His tongue flicked over his lips, moistening them, reminding himself of his own physical body, and then he spoke into the headset he wore. “Control, this is Beckett. I’ve got a wobble.”
There was a long moment of silence, then his radio crackled. “Say it again. You’ve got a what?”
“A wobble,” Beckett said. “I don’t know a better word for it.”
“A wobble.” The voice was that of Dr. Radek Zelenka, the Czech scientist who was, with Dr. McKay, one of the foremost experts on Ancient technology. Certainly he was one of the foremost experts on Atlantis, having spent most of the last five and a half years repairing her systems.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Beckett said. “I don’t know how to put it better, Radek. It feels like a tire about to go off.”
“Atlantis does not have tires, Carson,” Zelenka replied.
“I know it doesn’t.” Beckett looked up toward the ceiling, as though he could see Zelenka in the gateroom many stories above, no doubt bent worriedly over a console, his glasses askew. “That’s what it feels like. That’s how my mind interprets it.”
“He says we have a wobble. Like a flat tire.” Zelenka was talking to someone else. “I do not know. That is what Carson says.”
“A wobble?” That was McKay, the Canadian Chief of Science. “What’s a wobble, Carson?”
“It feels wrong,” Beckett said. “I don’t know how to explain the bloody thing! It feels like there’s something wrong.”
“I am seeing nothing with propulsion,” Zelenka said. Beckett could see how he would say it, his hands roving over the control board, data reflected in his glasses. “Everything is well within the normal operating parameters.”
“I think I would interpret a propulsion problem as an engine light,” Beckett said slowly.
“And a tire is what?” McKay would be putting his head to the side impatiently. “Do you think you can give me engineering, not voodoo? Your vague analogy is next to worthless.”
Lying back in the chair, Beckett rolled his eyes. Five and a half years he’d put up with Rodney bullying him over this damned interface. “Something to do with the hyperdrive?” he ventured.
“The hyperdrive. That’s very informative. The hyperdrive is a major system, Carson. It has literally tens of thousands of components.”
“I don’t know any more than that, all right?” Beckett snapped. “If you want a second opinion, get Sheppard down here and have him take a go at it.”
“He has only been off duty for two hours,” Zelenka said, presumably to McKay. “He is probably still in the mess hall. I can call him.” McKay must have nodded, because his next words were not addressed to Beckett. “Colonel Sheppard to the command chair room. Sheppard to the command chair room.”
He should love being pulled away from his dinner after a twelve hour shift. Beckett felt vaguely guilty about that. He sat up a bare ten minutes later as Sheppard barreled into the room, an open bottle of soft drink in his hand, his dark hair ruffled.
“What’s the problem?” Sheppard said. He couldn’t be too worried if he’d brought along his drink. Soft drinks were rare in Atlantis, since they had to be brought from Earth, and though they’d laid in a limited supply it could be expected to run out soon. Sheppard was unwilling to abandon his short of murder and mayhem.
Beckett smiled ruefully. For all their differences of background and skills, he had developed a considerable respect for Sheppard in their years of working together, a respect he thought was mutual. “Sorry to take you from your dinner. I’ve got an anomaly I can’t pin down.” He sat up, letting the chair come upright, the sticky interfaces disengaging from his fingertips. “It feels like a wobble. You know. When you’ve got a tire about to go.”
Sheppard frowned and put his drink down on the edge of the platform. “Ok. Let’s have a look,” he said with the air of a man about to look under a friend’s hood.
Beckett stood up, catching himself for a moment on the arm of the chair. It always felt very strange to settle back into his mere physical body after some time in the interface.
Sheppard slid into the chair and leaned back, his eyes closing as the interfaces engaged, the chair lighting around him as power flowed, a profound expression of peace on his face. Beckett knew better than to interrupt. Sheppard’s fingers twitched lightly in the interface, then stilled. He would be diving into it now, the pathways of the city’s circuits and cables mirroring the neural pathways of his mind. Done right, impulses flowed like thoughts, data streaming effortlessly into easy interpretations. Beckett usually did not find it quite that simple. Practice and diligence had made him a competent pilot for the city, but he had never quite gotten the knack of thinking in three dimensions, of visualizing so many moving points completely. He wasn’t a pilot. He was a medical doctor who through some trick of genetics had the particular piece of code that the city responded to. Sheppard was in his twentieth year in the Air Force, a man whose natural talents ran this way, honed by years of experience in high speed aircraft. He could get a lot more out of the interface than Beckett could.
It was nearly fifteen minutes before Sheppard surfaced, his eyes opening and the chair tilting halfway up. His glance fell on Beckett, but he spoke into his headset. “Control, this is Sheppard. We’ve got an anomaly in the number four induction array.”
“The east pier,” Zelenka said. “Zatracen! Will we ever get that piece of trash fixed?”
“Carson’s the one who tore it up fighting with the hive ship,” McKay said. “And I thought we had it. I ran a stress test on it the night before we left.”
“Well, you must have missed something,” Zelenka said. “Because here we go with it again.”
“It doesn’t look like it’s that bad,” Sheppard said, cupping the headset and straightening up completely in the chair. “It’s a wobble, like Carson said. It’s not a flat. It’s just a variance in output.”
“A crashingly small one,” McKay said. “I’ve got the power log in front of me now. Five one hundredths of one percent.”
“After running at full power for five days?” Zelenka was probably leaning over McKay’s shoulder, looking at the numbers. “No wonder you didn’t catch it. That is nothing. We cannot expect every system to run at optimal for days on end. It would not show up in a stress test.”
“Give me the summary.” That was a new voice, Richard Woolsey, Atlantis’ commander. “Should we drop out of hyperspace?” He was probably hovering over the two scientists by now.
It was McKay who spoke, of course. “And do what? We’re between the Milky Way and the Pegasus Galaxy, right in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. I’m not seeing any kind of damaged component that we can repair, or quite frankly anything that amounts to a problem. Carson, it’s nice of you to tell us about every little wobble, but this is just that. A little, tiny wobble.”
Sheppard looked at Beckett and shrugged. “That now we know about. So we can keep an eye on it. It’s just exactly like a tire. You may not need to run and do something about a little dent in the rim, but you keep an eye on it.”
Beckett unhunched his shoulders, putting his hands in his pockets.
“Yes, well. We will keep an eye on it,” McKay said. “But I think we can all take a deep breath and put this away.”
Sheppard stood up, flexing his hands as he withdrew them from the interface.
“I’m sorry to put you to trouble,” Beckett said. “I hope your dinner’s not cold.”
“It’s ok.” Sheppard picked his drink up off the floor. “Better safe than sorry. And we should keep an eye on that. You have a little wobble in your tire one minute, and the next thing you know you have a blowout doing eighty.”
“And that would be bad,” Beckett said, imagining what the analogy to a high speed blowout might be pilotin
g a giant Ancient city through hyperspace between galaxies. It would put a pileup on the M25 to shame.
“Damn straight,” Sheppard said, taking a drink of his soda. “See you at 06:00, Carson.”
“This turn and turn again is getting old,” Beckett said. “What I’d give for another pilot!”
“We couldn’t exactly bring O’Neill with us under the circumstances,” Sheppard said.
“Four more days,” Beckett said. “Over the hump.” He slid back into the chair, feeling the interfaces clinging to his fingertips in preparation. “See you in the morning.” He closed his eyes, sinking into Atlantis’ embrace.
***
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Table of Contents
DEATH GAME
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
About the Author
Sneak Preview
STARGATE ATLANTIS
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